7 - Piero as Lorenzo’s Deputy in 1490

Summary

The interest of the two months from late April to late June 1490 lies in the light they throw on Piero’s active involvement in politics, as well as on his more hidden role as Lorenzo’s stand-in, collaborating with the friends in the Otto di Pratica (the all-important foreign affairs magistracy) to ensure that Lorenzo got his way. He already enjoyed a close relationship with Niccolò Michelozzi, the principal secretary who remained in Florence, and neither Michelozzi nor Piero Dovizi (with Lorenzo at the baths) found much to add – they said – to Piero’s letters at this time. Michelozzi only once added a paragraph in his own hand to one of them, and on 9 May he told Lorenzo he was letting Piero communicate with him, since he ‘writes and behaves most diligently, as you have seen’. And Dovizi told Michelozzi that he rarely wrote to him any longer: ‘writing to Piero, as one is doing, there’s very little or nothing to say to you’.¹